None, trust me, none of your blog readers would read each word of the article you post regularly. It’s a proven fact that people glance through the page, skim for essential information, and go to other website for more of it.

If you, however, don’t know about your readers’ habit, you would fail miserably as a blogger. Hence, it’s quite significant to know how they read and find an effective solution to attract more readers.

How do they read?

Most readers judge the article based on the headlines and first paragraph of the post. Few people reach till the middle, and rarely any reader reads the whole post, till the last line, word to word.

Now, I know many of you wouldn’t agree with this and argue that it’s wrong, or at least, sad. It is, however, the reality and we have to face it.

The only reason a person is reading your article is because he or she liked the headline. No? you don’t believe me? Think about how you start with reading an article. You first look at the headline to know what the article is all about. If it interests you, you read it. If it doesn’t, you move on. Here are few choices readers make every day:

• Email Subscription or RSS feed:
  The only thing they notice is the headline. If it’s interesting they read it, if it’s not, they ignore it.
• Links:
  Many readers are directed to your website through links placed on other blogs. So, once again, your article is judged by the headline you have mentioned in the link.
• Social Media:
  

  On social media sites, you are not alone. There are thousands of articles and links lying all over. If yours is interesting, people might click it.

So, what do you do? How do you make people read your article just by the headlines?

• Attention Grabbing:
  Make sure the headline you choose must be attention grabbing. This doesn’t mean you have to include something sensational. It can be simple, but not boring.
• Curious:
  Every click by an internet user is due to curiosity. The headlines you create must make people curious. You can use a question, or teaser, to grab attention and make people curious.
• Relevant Content:
  Okay, you created an attention grabbing headline that made people curious. But you don’t have anything relevant in the post. This will certainly disappoint your readers, and repel them from your website. So make sure you mention the fact in the headline, but in an innovative way.

Headline of your post should be simple, precise yet attractive and strong enough to compel your readers to pay attention.

I have got some secrets to tell you… Pssst… Promise me you won’t share it with anyone?

I have been blogging since many years, and I am doing quite well. I feel like I am sharing the secrets of blogging with everyone. Yet, there are few things I don’t want anyone to know, not even my favorite readers or fellow bloggers.

Lately, I found these secrets are kept by most of the bloggers from around the world. If not all, they have at least few of the ones mentioned below. Here is the list of things we all bloggers want to keep secret. Again, please don’t mention anyone that I shared it with you.

1. Aren’t We Making Up Few Things?
   Definitely not every thing we write is made up, but few things, yes. We try something, we like it because it works, and we pass it on to others through our blogs. But there are some things we just make it up and test if it works. And if it doesn’t, we try to make up something else.C’mon, we all do it. But we don’t have what it takes to accept it. Not everything that a blogger writes is tested and proved.
   
2. And We Are Always Afraid About It
   Since not every article we post is genuine, we feel our readers, or other bloggers, or some one else will find it out sooner or later. And we will stand naked with crowd pointing at us, laughing.If you want to know who has this fear, search for bloggers who write confidently about everything. I am sure, majority of us does this. We want to hide our fears and don’t want to show that we have made up something. Hence, we write confidently about every thing.
3. We Don’t Use Our Own Suggestions
   Don’t you think the people who write about motivation are never un-motivated or bored? They are. Why don’t they follow their own suggestions? I too preach about blogging, creativity, SEO, motivation, and so on, but sometimes I just feel like running away from all this for few days. At that time, I don’t feel like reading my own suggestions and using them.
4. We All Are Lazy
   Yet, we write about hard work, determination, courage, etc. All human beings are lazy, only the level of laziness differs. The truth is nobody is perfect. We just try to create an illusion, through our blogs, that we are perfect, and hard working, and blah, blah, blah.
5. We Are Not Creators, We Are Just Followers
   The ideas we share are never original. We pick up an advice, modify it, decorate it, improve it a bit, and present it to our readers. Absolutely nothing in this blogsphere is original. The same ideas are being circulated but with a personal, different perspective. One in a while, however, a new idea comes in, and we all pounce on it, to be the first one to modify it.
6. Yet, We Love Our Blogs
   In spite of all these flaws, we love it. One, because we preach about loving our job. Two, it’s easy and fun. And Three, it makes money.

Along with being time consuming, blogging can, at times, be quite exasperating. There are numerous duties you need to perform daily in order to maintain your blog and bring it on the top. These things, however, diminishes your enthusiasm and develops boredom.

Fortunately, there are few things you can do to lower your frustration and boost your blog efficiency.

1. Take regular breaks
   If you want be creative in writing content, doing SEO, or designing your blog, you have to be fresh, always. Hence, it becomes necessary for a blogger to take breaks at regular intervals and refresh your mind. You can get out of your house, take a walk, have a coffee, do some exercise, or anything that help you to revitalize yourself.
2. Eliminate Mundane Work
   When you start a new blog, everything seems to be quite energizing, and you are at the peak of your efficiency. With time, however, it becomes a routine, and daily, you fight the urge to give up due to increased level of boredom. Even if you don’t renounce, how can you expect to be creative. Your work would stink. Get out of your routine and change the way you work. Don’t let boredom enter your blogs.
3. Know when to stop
   

   If quantity would have generated results, every casual writer would have been a famous blogger. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Instead of pushing yourself to work every hour, know when are you most productive and work accordingly. Overindulging in work can be frustrating, unproductive, and simply waste of time.

4. Be organized
   There is much more to being organized than just making notes. You can start with tiny things like keeping reminders, cleaning your computer often, keeping your desk clutter free, etc. This is the only thing where I would like you to be ruthless. By being organized you work in a clean environment, never forget things, have a track of what’s done, and eventually, increase productivity.
5. Back Up Plan
   Ever thought about a back up plan? No? Then, how would you ensure smooth progress of you blog when power goes out? What would you do if you hard disk crashes? How will you upload your posts if the battery charger dies?Take some time and derive a back up plan. Have a back up of all the data into your computer, have more than one charger, seek alternate working area with similar facilities, etc. don’t let a small problem affect your blog.

These are some of the common things that affect the efficiency of a blogger. These problems would, however, keep distracting you (and your income) till you take up a proactive approach and eliminate them.

What are the other ways to be more efficient? Do you have some little but effective tips to boost the productivity of a blogger?

One of the questions people repeatedly ask me is how to get people’s attention back to old content. Truly, this is one of the most infuriating problems faced by bloggers these days. They work hard to develop their blog and write useful content, and end up having heaps of archives, which no one really reads. People don’t really bother exploring archives of a blog, new entry is all they read.

There are, however, variety of ways to get people read your old posts. One of the best ways to do this is having sections like “popular posts”, “random posts”, etc. These sections can be placed on front page, side bar, or navigation area, or whatever location you feel would attract people to read the posts. You couldn’t, however, paste links of all your previous articles due to limitation of space. Hence, make sure you have links to some of the best posts of your blog.

Now these tags are, however, pretty common. So, you can use new title for such columns like “best of …”, “David recommends”, or “popular posts in January”, something like that. If you have lots of traffic on your front page, chances are majority of these people would be directed to your old posts.

Another idea to make people read your old posts is by having an auto responder. If you blog has good readership, you will receive numerous emails everyday. You can have an auto responder set in that send links of some of the very useful content to the people, which they might have probably missed earlier. Or whenever they sign up for a newsletter, this auto responder will send them the outline of your blog covering key content.

You can also have a section known as ‘related posts’ at the bottom of every article on your blog. This section should provide links to articles that are quite similar to the existing post. So, if a person is seeking for information on a particular topic, he would love to find similar content on your blog. Many wordpress plug-ins can do this for you. However, doing this manually would generate better results.

If the year is about to end, you can use something known as “best of 2009 or 2010” or whatever the year is. This bunch of links itself would be a post. It is, however, not necessary to wait till the end of the year to post such links. You can do it every month. If you really want people to read the content of your old posts, you can alter it a bit, may be by adding few pictures or updated information, and re-post it.

I guess every blogger must do these things to make people read your old posts. You have spent hundreds of hours to create these heaps of articles. Don’t you want people to read it?